


balm and seal

by bog gremlin (tomatocages)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Curses, Domestic Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mild Gore, Quests, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:08:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27319015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomatocages/pseuds/bog%20gremlin
Summary: October Reminder: Werewolves are usually very sore after transforming, give them a heating pad and some gentle massages and be sure to keep plenty of food and water on hand.Keith's always been small for a werewolf. Even though he's never had anyone to nurse him through the aftermath of the transformation, he wouldn't trade the moon for anything.And then he meets Shiro.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 47
Kudos: 233





	balm and seal

**Author's Note:**

> This story contains a brief mention of fairy tale-typical gore.
> 
> Originally published October 12, 2020 as [a thread on twitter](https://twitter.com/boggremlin/status/1315755410662531072). It has been edited and expanded from the original thread.

Oh love,

it is balm, but also a seal. It binds us tight

as the fur of a rabbit to the rabbit.

— from  [ _ Marriage, _ ](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/146227/marriage-5aa944d0ac052) by Ellen Bass

* * *

Keith’s small for a werewolf and he’s always been skinny, doesn’t really carry enough muscle and fat to ease the transformation every month. It takes a lot out of him: the twisting of his bones, the alternate pathways his veins slither into, the hair turning into fur. The life of a werewolf is one of freedom, but not freedom from pain. The moon keeps him on a tether and every month she pulls him from one skin and into another. It always hurt.

He toughs it out, but there’s a price to pay and days after the full moon are exhausting. His joints throb. He has to bandage his fingers because he tore a nail on his run and the wound won’t close. His throat is raw from howling.

It is such a lonely life. 

But he wouldn’t trade the moon for anything. Keith hates transforming. He’d still do it every day, just to be transformed. 

That’s how he meets Shiro: in the back aisle of the local apothecary, reaching for the same bag of epsom salts. Shiro takes a long look at Keith, at how he’s barely managed to wrap his abraded hands, and at the limp that makes him drag his leg after him. It is not a pitying look; but after he finishes it, Shiro hands the bag of salts over. Even kinder: he follows Keith to the counter and offers to pay. When Keith refuses, Shiro smiles at him and the next thing Keith knows — they’ve walked to the soup cart down on the corner and Shiro’s bought a cup of bone broth. And that’s that.

Wolves are social. Even though Shiro’s not a wolf — he’s a human, probably, though there’s something otherworldly about him — they become friends. It’s not so unusual for a werewolf to have friends outside of a larger pack, but it is unusual for Keith. Keith has always run alone. 

Keith knows he’s in for it when he caves to his instincts and starts bringing fresh kills to Shiro’s door at every full moon. But Shiro’s gracious about it, and he accepts the rabbits and voles and stoats, both when Keith drapes them across the front step and then directly from Keith’s jaws. With a smile! 

Shiro becomes a person to run to. His house: a den.

After a few months of this, Keith-as-a-wolf wakes up across the foot of a Shiro’s bed. The sun hasn’t risen and the moon hasn’t set and Shiro has brushed the burrs from Keith’s fur and washed the mud from his footpads. When Keith assumes his human shape, Shiro offers him a bath. 

Shiro owns a bathtub that’s bright green and lined with copper. It stays hot, piping hot, enough to turn Keith’s skin bright pink. Shiro laced the water with epsom salts and rosemary, and the water pulls the ache of his transformation out of his bones, like the opposite of tea brewing in a mug. 

The bath is lovely. Having someone else around to hover in the doorway and offer a warm towel after, followed by a sandwich, is even better. 

This, too, becomes routine. Keith loves Shiro by now, loves his steady company and the way he rubs the ache from Keith’s shoulders after the moon wanes.

He loves the way Shiro insists on clipping his claws before a long run. It pays off. Keith hasn’t torn a nail since they started doing this. And he’s finally putting on weight, enough so that his body can better withstand the change and his fur is glossy and soft. His limp fades away to nothing, his joints stop creaking, and Keith has never felt so powerful or fast before in his life. 

Shiro seems to enjoy this development as well. Sometimes Keith comes back early from the hunt, because there is no need to keep running once he’s caught a fat animal for Shiro’s stewpot. Shiro never turns his nose up at any of Keith’s kills, no matter how small: he just smiles and skins them and makes dinner. And they both like it, on wintery nights, when Keith-as-a-wolf lies across Shiro’s cold feet. The way he turns back into a man come morning, and Shiro tends to him.

One day, years after they’ve started whatever this is, Shiro stops Keith before he leaves the house. Keith doesn’t need help with the door, because Shiro changed all the knobs to latches ages ago. Shiro stops him so he can place a kiss on Keith’s muzzle before he lopes out the door.

_ Oh, _ Keith thinks. He didn’t realize he was so happy, that he could feel so strong.

They become a mated pair. And things are good, Keith loves Shiro and is loved by him, and it doesn’t matter that Shiro is not a wolf and cannot run under the light of the moon, because he is always waiting for Keith to run home. 

So when Shiro disappears and the witch who lives deep in the wood tries to bargain with Keith for Shiro’s return (just a return, not a safe one), Keith turns away from her offer and runs headfirst into the darkness. He knows where to look.

He meets other wolves along the way. They run with him. Pack life is strange, and he can’t say he prefers the way they puppy pile for warmth after the moon. It helps soothe the pain of the changes, a little, but nothing is better than the weight of Shiro’s hands on him, the way his mate cares for him. Still. They are wolves, and Keith needs all the help he can get. There’s strength in numbers, in the way they howl and sing the same songs.

He runs to the end of the world, across the sky, and then all the way to the moon. She’s Shiro’s mother, it turns out. After some bargaining — Keith has never howled so long and so sorrowfully in all his life — the moon relents and reveals where Keith can find her son.

Keith runs again, down from the sky and across the earth, over the sea and until he returns to the edge of his own wood. When he faces down the witch who has stolen Shiro away, he bites her with his strong teeth. Keith was never very strong, before he met Shiro, but he’s powerful now. He tears the witch and her spell the pieces, and finds Shiro where he’s hidden

Shiro has been secreted in the heart of a tree. It’s stealing his bones; but Keith’s not human, and it’s nothing to bite away at the poisonous wood that’s tangled itself along one of Shiro’s arms, threading its roots into his veins in order to drink up his blood.

“He won’t have a heart, once you get him out,” one of the wolves from his temporary pack warns Keith.

That’s fine; Keith will share his own.

It takes time, but Shiro does come back from the place he went when he was in the poison tree. His hair is white now, moon-bright (his mother touched him so Keith would know where to run and find him; he shines in the dark).

They return home.

Keith visits another witch, a kind one who lives in town. He makes his case. Very gingerly, the witch opens up Keith’s chest and takes out his heart. Keith bites it in two with his own teeth, and brings it home to his mate.

Shiro accepts the gift, like he’s accepted every gift Keith has ever given him

The first few years after Keith gives Shiro half his heart are harder than he thought they would be. Keith's transformations, always difficult, are now a form of torture: his blood flows sluggishly, and it takes longer to shed his human shape and force himself into the body of his wolf.

It's still a gift, in Keith's eyes. It’s not as hard as it would be to live without Shiro at all. 

Shiro feels things differently too. The half-heart within him echoes with the way Keith's bones crunch and reset themselves now, and he feels too the way the moon tugs and pulls Keith from one form to the next. Shiro feels wild and unhinged at the shared pain of it: Keith has never complained. 

Shiro has some of the loudest arguments he'll ever have with his mother, when Keith's out running in the woods.

The moon doesn't really understand anger. She shines dimly on her son and illuminates his white hair, softens the scars he bears after his time in the prison-tree.

"It was a gift," she points out, about the heart. Shiro wears that scar proudly. Keith gave it to him. He lets his shirts drape open over his chest, or goes without one entirely when the weather's mild. "You didn't refuse it."

(That's the thing about gifts: they have strings.)

Shiro doesn't want to return Keith's heart. He's too greedy for it. He loves Keith and Keith's matter-of-factness, his self-sacrifice, the way he still goes out hunting and lays small animals at Shiro's feet. Shiro would no more trade his half-wolf heart back than Keith would give up transforming. It doesn’t matter how much it hurts, only that they each want to spare the other.

(Shiro knows that if he tried to give it up, Keith wouldn't have any heart left to speak of. He’d wither and die. That’s how these things work, even when you take magic out of the equation: they're a mated pair.)

So the moon takes pity on him, and they make a bargain. Every time Keith limps off through the woods, tracing a circular territory around the little house Shiro built for them, Shiro goes out into the garden and learns some magic of his own.

It's small magic. Shiro's not quite human, and now he's also not-quite wolf, but none of those parts make up a whole. He’s never bothered to learn how to use magic; that’s why he was looking for epsom salts in the pharmacy, all those years ago. 

Mostly he spends his lessons learning how to manage mundane and silly things, a kind of magic barely anyone bothers with nowadays. How to heat bathwater and keep it hot; the secret to unfolding a blanket without using his fingers; finding his way out of a locked room. If the witch in the wood were still alive to see it, she would laugh herself back to death. Shiro’s mother is the moon. She could give him many things, but this is what he asks for.

It's strong enough, though, that when Keith staggers home — his black fur is turning white, these days, and Shiro doesn't know if it's because Keith ran to the moon and back, or if it's just his heart — Shiro can greet him. And oh, if Keith had been greeted with every trapping of love before, now Shiro has made every gesture bloom with power.

The bathwater is always perfectly hot. When Keith emerges, naked and trembling, Shiro can embrace him and know that the blankets on their bed will unroll themselves. 

He tells Keith about the magic lessons. Keith always listens — he's a fine listener — and smiles, and doesn't ask why Shiro wanted to know how to unlock doors.

Their house has never had locks. Keith can't latch them, and Shiro never saw the need.

The other wolves who ran with Keith when he was on his quest stop by, now and then. They view Keith with a mixture of fascination and respect. The change is hard for every werewolf. It's like how human women suffer when they give birth: the price they pay to run in the woods, under the stars, and to sing and sing to a moon that rarely answers back.

Keith has made it harder on himself, and he did it with his own teeth.

One day, many years from now, Keith will go out running in the woods. And when morning comes and he has not returned, Shiro will go walking across the wide world until he finds the splintered remains of his old prison tree.

Shiro will clear out the nesting squirrels and beetles from its trunk, and when the moon rises he will wave up at her before climbing into the tree and following the rotting tangle of its roots down, down, down. The world beneath doesn’t have any stars at all, just shadows and the pervasive smell of leaf-rot. It’s not unpleasant; just cold. 

When he finds Keith — just a shadow, a shade, a half-wolf waiting in the dark — Shiro will bend and kiss Keith's muzzle, as he's always done. The smell of dead leaves will blot out every one of Keith’s other senses, but he will always recognize the way Shiro kisses him: in this form, and in the form of a man.

Shiro will whisper a little magic in Keith's ghostly ear and tug him up to his feet by the scruff of his neck, cajoling him forward until they are walking in tandem.

They'll walk a while, until Shiro prompts Keith into a run, and they'll go faster and faster —

And they'll run right out of the underworld, Shiro's magic unlocking the door at the end.

They will be safe.


End file.
